11/09/2007 @ 12:15PM

War Stories

An interview with John Palattella, co-editor of Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It, edited with Mike Hoyt and the staff of the Columbia Journalism Review ($22, Melville House Publishing, 2007).

Last fall, the Columbia Journalism Review interviewed 47 reporters, translators and photographers for an oral history of covering the war. The book that emerged is a harrowing portrait of what it was like to live and work in Iraq as the country rapidly descended into chaos.

The war in Iraq has not been an easy story to tell, not only because of the extraordinary dangers presented to reporters (123 journalists have been killed in Iraq since the war began) but also because of the White House’s changing justifications for the war itself. To critics who make accusations of media bias, the book highlights the good reporting still being done by the many journalists committed to seeing the story of the war through to its uncertain, but certainly bloody, end.

John Palattella, literary editor of The Nation, talks about Reporting Iraq‘s myriad perspectives and tentative conclusions.

Forbes.com: What was the impetus for this project?

John Palattella:Columbia Journalism Review had asked Farnaj Fashihi of The Wall Street Journal to keep a diary of her time in the country, in 2004. But she ended up scooping the magazine when one of the periodic e-mails she sent to friends about daily life in Baghdad leaked outside her circle of friends and circulated around the globe.

She talked a lot about the dangers of reporting and how her sense of insecurity and fear of being harmed was impeding her reporting, and those weren’t observations that were often being made in newspaper stories at the time. One hears sort of back-channel stories about that, but that’s just talk, and her e-mail kind of broke things open by putting down in print what other people had been saying, so one immediately had a sense of this larger story of how the war was being reported that was between the lines of the stories themselves.

The Los Angeles Times‘ Alyssa Rubin talks about reporting as sifting through competing narratives, while The New Yorker’sJon Lee Anderson talks about reconciling the divide between perception and reality. What sort of reality do you think comes through in the book?

One reality was the increasingly difficult nature of reporting as the country spun further and further out of control.

There’s a story late in the book about an ambush somewhere in a Shiite-controlled town, and an Arabic television station dispatched a crew to cover the event. They arrived, and the entire crew, which was Iraqi, was executed on the spot. So I think one story is the impact the danger had on different media outlets.

I think the book establishes that the narrative the [Coalition Provision Authority] was putting out every day was for the evening news. Patrick Graham tells that wonderful anecdote about watching a CPA briefing with Shiites, and the briefing was about an ambush. The people watching with him started laughing and then turned very angry because the briefer was describing this event as if it was just a bunch of bandits who got lucky when Graham knew from his reporting that people who staged that had very good intelligence. So what Graham learned then was that the CPA was not for the Iraqis, it was for American consumers of news.

Why did so much of what the CPA said make it onto the evening news, when journalists in the country were telling a different story?

I think the answer to this question is in the book, in the chapter called “The Good News.” During the first year of the occupation, it was clear that the broadcast and cable networks were channeling the CPA stuff; they weren’t reporting as much as channeling the news. If they’re channeling whatever the CPA is saying without endeavoring to verify it, one would be hard-pressed not to conclude that they wanted whatever was happening to succeed. The CPA was churning out propaganda. People in the book don’t use that word, but some of them come within a hair’s breadth of uttering it. That’s why they got so upset at the CPA briefings, because they had no relationship to the reality the reporters were reporting on.

How did you decide who to interview for this project?

We probably began with somewhere around 70 names, and we ended up interviewing 47 people. Some people declined. Some people wanted very badly to be interviewed, but the logistics never worked. In one of the [New York Times writer] Dexter Filkins entries late in the book, he just talks about how you work all day long when you’re there, there are no breaks.

Jon Lee Anderson was interviewed while he was in Afghanistan during a trip. He was traveling somewhere and found the time to stop his journey, get out of the car, and stand on the side of the road and talk to our reporter for almost three hours. Things like that happened, people really found the time to talk to us. And we were very grateful for that. Again, because I think that much of what’s discussed in the book pertains to issues that rarely make it into stories, unless they’re first-person stories.

Getting back to your first question, another reason we wanted to do the oral histories–and Dexter and other people talk about this in the book–reporters were being savaged by readers from all over the political spectrum about what they were reporting on: “How could you say that, you must be shilling for Saddam,” or “How could you say that, you must be shilling for Bush.” And people were basing these judgments just on what they gleaned from other publications and media. At some point, you say enough is enough, we need to learn more about what these reporters are experiencing while they’re doing these stories, and maybe that will provide the public with a greater sense of the great length these people go to to get things right, to the degree that it is possible.